Dr. David Ansell talks to Leonard Lopate in New York

David Ansell tells the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals, Chicago's Cook County Hospital—both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital covers more than 30 years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship there. Ansell writes of the doctors and patients, politics, and public health, and gives an account of a young doctor’s medical education in urban America, set against a backdrop of race, segregation and poverty.